“The decision was not made lightly, considering the advanced stage of development,” chief executive Andreas Barner said on Friday of the hoped-for moneyspinner aimed at premenopausal women with a persistent and unexplained lack of sex drive.

Boehringer’s move marked the failure of the latest attempt to find a female counterpart to Pfizer’s Viagra, the blockbuster blue pill for men. Drugmakers have tested various ways to boost female libido, but women’s sex lives have proved difficult to target with medication.

U.S. government advisers said in June that Boehringer’s pink pill, based on the active ingredient flibanserin, offered little help to women and had unacceptable risks — nearly 15 percent of women stopped taking a pill before a study ended due to side effects including depression, fainting and fatigue.

That led the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to ask unlisted Boehringer in August for more information on flibanserin, which would have been marketed as Girosa.

“The response of the authorities and the complexity and extent of further questions that would need to be addressed to potentially obtain registration for flibanserin have impacted the company’s decision to focus on other pipeline projects,” Boehringer said.

Drugmakers have been searching for a medicine to improve women’s sex lives since Viagra’s debut 12 years ago. The market for a “pink Viagra” could stretch into the billions of dollars.

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The wafer, which is similar to breath freshener strips sold in sweet shops, appears to work quicker than Viagra.

It is estimated that one in two men over the age of 40 suffers difficulties obtaining erections from time to time with potential causes ranging from diabetes and hormonal problems to stress and depression.

The NHS spends around £58 million a year on handing out more than 17 million repeat prescriptions for Viagra and other impotence drugs to combat this.

Drugs such as Viagra, Cialis and Levitra have transformed the treatment of impotence, or erectile dysfunction, in the past ten years.

Prior to their development, the only options were to inject drugs straight into the penis, or use a pump that manually increased blood supply to the organ.

Unsurprisingly, neither was very popular.

However, anti-impotence pills also have drawbacks because most men take Viagra between 30 minutes and an hour to fully respond to the medicine – a delay which proved a passion-killer for many couples.

The new treatment contains the same active ingredients as other anti-impotence pills, but in smaller molecules.

These are packed into a tiny soluble strip that sits on the tongue and disappears within seconds. In a pilot study where the wafer was compared with a conventional impotence pill, the wafer released similar amounts of medicine into the bloodstream.

Further trials show the wafer works 30 per cent more quickly than Viagra, with most men responding in under 30 minutes, compared with 40-60 minutes for other drugs.

This is because the tissues lining the mouth are packed with hundreds of tiny blood vessels which lie near the surface of the cheek and under the tongue -these provide a quick access route into the bloodstream.

Now the manufacturer, Canadian firm IntelGenx, is planning bigger trials to confirm the initial findings and the melting wafer could be available within the next two to three years.

The same technology could also be used to develop fast-acting ‘wafers’ for pain relief, high blood pressure and depression.

Dr David Edwards, a specialist in sexual medicine from Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire, said the dissolving wafer could be a major breakthrough in the treatment of erectile dysfunction.

‘This could benefit a great many men. A similar type of wafer is already used in the treatment of migraine, where it’s important to tackle pain quickly. Anything that is able to melt on the tongue will have a faster response time than a pill.

The drug Doxorubicin has been used for years as an anti-cancer drug for prostate cancer among other forms of the disease. Although Doxorubicin is effective, it has been associated with irreversible heart damage which generally occurs several years after treatment stops. Researchers have worked hard to find a medication that protects the heart without limiting the effect of the chemotherapy. Now it seems that the erectile dysfunction treatment Viagra may be the answer.

Experts at Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine gave Viagra to test rats while simultaneously treating them with Doxorubicin. Not only did the combination of the two drugs reduce tumour size, but it also alleviated damage to the heart.

Lead investigator Dr Rakesh C. Kukreja said: “We believe sildenafil could be an excellent candidate for incorporation into cancer treatment protocols with the potential of enhancing the anti-tumour efficacy, while protecting the heart against both short-term and long-term damage.”

The research team are now hoping to proceed to the next stage of the trial – testing the combination of drugs on cancer patients. Their findings so far are published in the latest edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A versatile drug

Viagra is a versatile drug. It was originally designed to treat arthrosclerosis, but showed the unexpected side effect of causing erections during tests. Following this it was designed as, and has since been used as, a drug to treat erectile dysfunction. But many more uses have been found for Viagra. Viagra has been used to treat patients with heart and lung problems, by opening up blood vessels. Viagra has also been used to help with pregnancy and newborn children. With relatively few side effects Viagra has been hailed as a highly effective impotence drug, that can also help with many other conditions.

They say the NHS is wasting tens of millions of pounds every year on tablets which don’t treat the cause of problem.

Many of the men handed prescriptions by their GP are actually suffering from low testosterone levels, which cannot be treated by Viagra alone.

This is because the impotence pill is dependent on the sex hormone in order for it to work in the first place.

Instead, doctors recommend that men should have a simple blood test to determine their levels of testosterone.

If found to be low, it can be easily treated with testosterone pills, patches and gels which are all relatively inexpensive.

The NHS spends around £58 million a year on handing out more than 17 million repeat prescriptions for Viagra and other impotence drugs.

So if half of men have low testosterone, millions of NHS money is being wasted.

Low testosterone is a common conditions affecting 40 per cent on men over the age of 40, and one in five of those who suffer some form of impotence.

Although levels of the hormone start to decline with age, some people are affected much earlier on in their lives than others.

It can also be a symptom of an underlying health condition such as diabetes and heart disease so experts say it is crucial that it is properly diagnosed

Typical symptoms include tiredness, mood swings, insomnia – as well as low sex drive, the reason most will visit their doctor.

But sexual health experts warn that many GPs are simply prescribing Viagra by default rather than diagnosing the root cause of the problem

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1315618/Viagra-branded-flop-half-male-users.html

It would give men the chance to buy the anti-impotence drug without a prescription.

The tablets are earmarked to go on sale at 300 UK stores from next week at the knock-down price of £52 for eight instead of the usual £55 for four.

Shona Scott, Tesco commercial manager for pharmacy services was quoted as saying: “The service is available to men aged between 40 and 65.

“They will have to complete a questionnaire and we will then carry out a blood pressure test, diabetes screen and cholesterol test.”

Sainsbury’s and Superdrug confirmed they would also sell the medicines at cost price.

It means cancer patients forced to buy their own life-prolonging drugs could save thousands of pounds when the policy starts on Monday.

Patients have to shop around for drugs prescribed privately because the NHS refuse to fund them.

But those with the disease have been faced with mark-ups of up to 76 per cent when they buy the medicines.

Some have taken out loans or mortgages to meet the bills, which often reach several thousand pounds for a course of treatment.

Asda’s announcement throws the spotlight on plans by the Government to launch from April 2011 a £200million cancer drug fund to give patients better access to medicines.